Linkwithin did a pretty good job with the widget. However, I was not entirely satisfied with it as the related posts were no where near as good as what YARPP showed.

To my joy, I did find a nice tutorial that allows you to create a custom YARPP template that will make it look quite similar to a Linkwithin widget.

We also have it in action on this very blog and our also in our RSS feed. At the end of the post you will see a custom YARPP template in action, which displays images along with the related posts.

If you want to build a similar related posts section visit this tutorial from Build Internet to create related posts with thumbnails. You can choose to style your related posts in any way by customizing the CSS code.

If you are not keen to make code changes, you can make use of other WordPress plugins that perform the same job.

While working on the redesign of Techie buzz, I had several things in mind that I wanted to include in the design. One of the things was to make the design widescreen friendly by making use of a larger content area.

Throughout the design process, I asked several team members to test the design on different browsers. However, all the testers had one thing in common, they were all using widescreen monitors.

Once I rolled out the new design, one of my friends and fellow bloggers Deepak Jain sent me a message saying that the design was broken on his PC. On further investigation, I found that he was using a monitor with a max resolution of 1024×768 pixels. The new design did not particularly work well on those resolutions.

Now I personally did not want to change the width to just fit properly in 1024×768 resolutions. To overcome that I came up with a much better solution.

I separated all the hardcoded width for the layers, and copied it to a separate file.

I then created a copy of the new file, and modified it to work in 1024×728 pixel screen resolution.

I then wrote a conditional Javascript to include the CSS based on the screen resolution of the user.

Doing this made the them work properly on both 1024×76 pixel and higher screen resolutions.

Here is the code that can be used to include CSS based on different resolutions.

This article is mainly for those of you who have a website or post files to web servers using FTP (file transfer protocol). Most of you may already be using an FTP client such as FileZilla to upload all of your files. This works great but sometimes you may want to upload only one or two files. It takes time to launch the FTP client and make sure it’s pointing to the proper location before you upload. I’ll show you a quick way to upload files by simply right clicking on them and using the built-in Windows Sendto menu. This will take a few minutes to set up, but one nice thing about this procedure is that it doesn’t require you to download and install any new software.

Windows XP: Open “My Network Places” and click on “Add a network place”

Windows Vista/7: Right click on any empty area and select “add a network location” and click “Next” when the Add Network wizard pops up.

Select “Choose another network location” and click “Next”.

Enter the FTP address for the FTP server.

Enter the user name and un-check the “Log on anonymously” box

Finish creating the network location. It will try to connect to your FTP server. Once it does, it’ll ask you to enter your password. You can tell it to remember your password at this point if you want to.

When you have your new Network Place (FTP server) open, navigate to the folder where you most commonly upload files. Right click on the folder and select “copy”

Windows XP: Open up the Start > Run menu and type in “sendto”. The Sendto folder should open. Right click in an empty area in the Sendto folder and paste a shortcut. You can rename the shortcut at this point if you wish.

Windows Vista/7: Finding the Sendto folder is a pain in the rear. Typically it’s located at …
C:\Users\*YourUserName*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo.

Right click in an empty area in the Sendto folder and paste a shortcut. You can rename the shortcut at this point if you wish.

Now when you need to quickly send a file or files using FTP, you can right click on the files, choose “Sendto” and then pick the shortcut you just created.

Be sure to comment below if you have you’re own ideas on how to easily upload via FTP.

Continue reading if you are interested in the solutions I use to keep the 404 error hits to a minimum.

404 Error Tracking using Link patch

There are 100s of 404 error tracking plugins and services. My favorite and the one that I use on this site is Link patch.

This service provides you with a single line of JavaScript code that you will need to paste into your custom 404 error page.

Once you have added the code, Link patch will email you everytime your site hits a 404 error. You can then correct the URL or redirect it to another URL.

In addition to that, it also tells you from which referring page a 404 error was encountered. If that happens to be your own site, you can go in and edit your posts to rectify the problem.

This service is definitely pretty useful and a must use service for any webmaster. It does come at a cost of $10 per month for tracking 5 websites. However I must tell you that the service is worth the money you pay and will help convert 404 error hits into regular readers.

If you are not ready to start paying yet, you can try out the service for free for the first 30 days. Signup for Link patch.

Fixing/Redirecting Broken Links/404 Pages on Your Website

Using the above service you can easily track all the 404 error pages. But what about fixing them?

If you are a WordPress user you can easily fix broken URLs by using a plugin called redirection.

This plugin will help you set permanent redirects (301) from one URL to another. In addition to that, you can also use wildcards in the form of regular expressions (regex).

Being a webmaster myself I have been using several bookmarklets for managing and tracking things, here is a list of bookmarklets that I use on a day to day basis, many of them have been created by me as they were not available elsewhere.

These bookmarklets are specifically created for webmasters and range from useful Check Technorati Reactions- This bookmarklet will allow you to check the Technorati Rank for any website.

User Generated Content or UGC is the norm of the day, there are some sites like the Fail Blog and other’s that solely run on user generated content, and blogs like Techie Buzz, where user comments constitute user generated content.

Google AdSense is a big revenue stream for everyone including UGC blogs and regular blogs, however un-moderated UGC may not always be safe for work and may include nudity or links to blogs related to them or for that matter spam blogs.

The Inside AdSense blog posted a few guidelines for User Generated Content, however here is a glaring note on what can get you surely banned from AdSense solely based on user generated content.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms — images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn’t only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren’t permitted by our policies.

So if you run a user generated site, or allow comments on your blog, make sure you follow the above guidelines to the core.

All is not lost for such blogs or websites, you can clearly have a category marked as adult and add those stories there, however you cannot place AdSense codes on those category pages. AdSense policies also bars users from adding AdSense code on adult sites, so if you have a site that only caters to adult content,we highly advise you not to use AdSense on those sites.

Here are some general prevention tips published by the Inside AdSense blog.

Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site’s services.

If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.

Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we’re unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as “keyword filtering” or “content filtering” on Google.com.

Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for “spambot protection”.

There are several other things you should be careful for, but yes moderation is very important so make sure you moderate those blog comments and check the links of commentators before approving them.

Disasters are just around the corner waiting to happen without any intimation, and due to ignorance many of us have lost enormous amounts of data and also spent lots of money to recover things we would have better off keeping backups of.

A blog or website is no different, you update it regularly and have written 1000s of articles, but what if there is a hardware crash? What if there is a problem with your server? Do you have ample backups to fall back on?

However we came across another interesting script that will allow you to backup your MySQL DB and email it to you for future use.

Backup2Mail automatically creates regular backups of your database and sends them to your mailbox on a given schedule, the script is PHP based so you can install in on any blog or website.

The author of the script also has a set of instructions to get you started, however you will need to have the ability to setup cron jobs to schedule database backups to be emailed out to you on a regular basis.

Definitely a must have script for webmasters who care about their data and want to be prepared for any unforeseen disasters lurking around the corner.

There may be times when you move to a newer house, in many of those cases you have to spend a whole lot of time updating your postal address for different services you use to make sure that your bills and other correspondence does not go to your old address.

The web acts in a similar way, however on the web the domain name is your home, and in many cases you may decide to move to a new domain name (URL change), for example you were earlier hosted on a WordPress or Blogger blog and decided to get your own domain, or for example you decided to change your domain name altogether.

Just like you move things from your old house to your new house, you also do the same by moving content from your old blog to your new blog, however when it comes to moving your traffic from your old blog to the new one, or updating the URLs (think home address) in search engines you don’t really have much choice except for using 301 (permanent) redirects to tell search engines that you have moved.

Google Webmaster tools with the introduction of Change of address makes the transition between domain names much more easier, the process will still require you to use 301 redirects from your old domain to your new one, however Google will now allow users to specify the URL of your new domain to make the process more smoother than before.

If you are moving from one domain to another, here are some steps you can follow to make the transition smoother, this assumes that you already have a Google Webmaster account, if you don’t have one yet, you can signup for a Google Webmaster account, however you will have to add both your old site and new site to your account if you didn’t have an account earlier.

Step 1: Move all content from your old blog to your new blog (we will be writing tutorials on how to do this soon)

Step 2: Make sure you use 301 redirects to permanently redirect content from your old blog to your new one.

Step 3: Login to your Google Webmaster account and add your new domain to it and verify the new domain.

Step 4: In your Google Webmasters account, manage your old domain and Click on Site configuration Change of address, remember you will be seeing a new interface, Google has now migrated to a newer interface for Webmaster Tools.

Step 5: Make sure you have followed all the instructions listed there, once you are sure, select a new domain name in step 4, that you want to use a the new URL for the older one and hit on submit.

That’s it, this will speed up your move and ease the process of moving from a old domain name to a new domain name on the internet, hope you enjoyed this tip, for more tips like these visit Webmaster Tips.

At Techie Buzz we use a cache server to serve up static content, it helps us reduce the load on the main server, however using a cache server in itself is not going to help speed up load time, you also need to make sure that the files are cached by the browser too.

Many webmasters do not do this, so here is something that will help speed up the load times for your website/blog.

You will need to edit the .htaccess file on your server, if you are not aware of what .htaccess does, you might find the Wikipedia article on Htaccess useful.

In addition to that, this .htaccess file must exist in the root directory of your website/blog.

1: FileETag INode MTime Size

2:

3: <IfModule mod_deflate.c>

4: <FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">

5: SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

6: Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2419200, public"

7: </FilesMatch>

8: </IfModule>

9:

10: <IfModule mod_expires.c>

11: ExpiresActive On

12: ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 20 seconds"

13: ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2 months"

14: ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2 months"

15: ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2 months"

16: ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 2 months"

17: ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 2 months"

18: ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 2 months"

19: ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 2 months"

20: </IfModule>

You can easily change the amount of time you want each component to be cached for, however most of the cache time in the above code is best suited for most websites/blogs.

You can view a clean copy of the .htaccess file here or download the file here, this should definitely help speedup your load times for return visitors.

Bing is suddenly sitting pretty much in a really good position, with Bing taking the second position over from Yahoo in both US and global traffic to search engines, this though should bring good news to webmasters since they would now get more traffic to their blogs or websites.

Like Google Webmaster Tools, Bing too has it’s own Webmaster center where users can submit their websites for indexing by Bing.